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Learn about the history of the 20th Century with these old magazine articles. Find information on 20th Century history by reading these historic magazine articles.
“For [many] years, Popular Mechanics has been Bible and Baedeker for craftsmen and the mechanically minded. In fresh, simple, pictorial fashion it has chronicled the technological miracles of the 20th Century, from gadgets like self-tipping hats to the revolution of nuclear energy.”
In 1942 a couple of veterans from the first go-round of
The Stars & Stripes (February 8, 1918, through June 13, 1919) visited the New York offices of Yank Magazine, after having read many of their first issues. Although wars had changed, the Army had changed soldier-journalism had changed in 24 years, the old men were impressed with Yank and had to reluctantly admit it.
“[Yank has] profited by all our old mistakes, made some gorgeous ones of their own, and profited by them – and have the guts to admit it! Which means the fighting-writing America of 1942 has actually progressed 24 years over the fighting-writing America of 1918.”
PM (1940 – 1948) was a left-leaning, New York-based evening paper that enjoyed some notoriety across the fruited plane on account of its founding editor, Ralph Ingersoll (1900 – 1985), who liked to believe that his steady mission was to create A tabloid for literates:
Contributors included Theodor Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss), I. F. Stone, Ad Reinhardt, J.T. Winterich, Leane Zug‐Smith, Louis Kronenberger and Ben Hecht; the photographs of Margaret Bourke‐White and Arthur Felig (aka Weegee) appeared regularly. Occasional contributors included Erskine Caldwell, Myril Axlerod, McGeorge Bundy, Saul K. Padover, Heywood Broun, James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, Eugene Lyons, Earl Conrad; Ben Stolberg, Malcolm Cowley.
Preferring to rely more on subscribers than advertisers, PM only lasted eight years.
From Scribner’s on-going series from 1938, Magazines That Sell came this brief history of the crowd-pleasing weekly, Collier’s (1888 – 1957).
This article looks at the rise of Vanity Fair, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and House & Garden – recognizing them as highly unique publications for their time. Special attention is paid to publisher Condé Nast and his meteoric rise during the early 20th Century.
The class magazines exude an aura of wealth and their circulations, therefore, are limited. They cater to the fit though few and they do this with slick paper, excellent illustrations and a sycophantic reverence for Society – at thirty-five to fifty cents a copy.
Click here to read about Fortune Magazine…
The Enemy, according to the underground press, is ‘The Establishment’ – an amorphous term used by young radicals to mean parents, teachers, school administrators, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the Pentagon, CIA, the media, government bureaucrats, the narcotics squad, businessmen, and the FBI. The favorite hate symbol within this curious Establishment is the policeman.
Twenty-three years after Harold Ross (1892 – 1951) launched The New Yorker, this profile of the man appeared on the newsstands:
Ross is a kind of impostor. The New Yorker is urbane; cactus is more urbane than Ross. The New Yorker carries understatement almost to the point of inaudibility; with Ross the expletive crowds out most of the eight parts of speech….It is true that he never had a high school education; but it is also true that he is a master grammarian, and that the superb sense of style which informs The New Yorker flows in part from his clean, uncompromising feeling for the English language.
Click here to read the second half of the Harold Ross profile. This portion is decorated with rejected cartoons from The New Yorker …
Ross never forgot his days in Paris as the editor of The Stars & Stars, click here to read an article about that period in his life.
Inasmuch as OldMagazineArticles.com is devoted to archiving the articles from the olde Yank, we are also keen on posting article about the magazine and its editorial policies, for few periodicals said as much about that generation and their lot in the Forties better than Yank. Attached is a photo essay from Coronet Magazine, illustrated with some 23 images, that tell the tale of how that weekly operated.
When W.W. II came to a close Yank Magazine was no more, this article was written –
The revolution in America today supports about a dozen main propaganda organs. Chief among them is The Daily Worker it makes no pretense at impartiality. It is a revolutionary [newspaper] and nothing else, frankly admitted at every turn. For the genuine Red no such thing as an impartial newspaper exists… No one gets paid very much in the Red press. Salaries of twenty or twenty-five dollars a week are the maximum. One reason is political, we are told. Revolutionaries do not believe in high salaries.
In 1887 the The New York Times reviewed the first English edition of Das Kapital by Karl Marx, click here to read it…
Click here to read more about the American communists of the 1930s.
Forty years ago the Boston publisher, Phillips, with the assistance of that famous coterie of American writers that included Longfellow, Lowell, Emerson, Whittier, Holmes, Motley, Quincy, Parker, Cabot and Underwood launched
The Atlantic Monthly
It was Holmes who named the magazine, and it was he, probably, more than any other, who assured its success… The prime object of The Atlantic was in the beginning and has continued to be the making of American literature, ‘to hold literature above all other human interests.’
Fortune is the world’s outstanding exponent of plush journalism. Its editors, long accustomed to prodigal expenditures, proudly talk of doing things ‘in the Fortune manner’. The Fortune manner may mean spending $12,000 on research for a single story. It means commissioning oil paintings of industrial tycoons for the sole purpose of reproduction in Fortune. It mean de luxe color gravure and high-priced writers…
The 625th issue of Newsweek marked their twelfth year on the newsstand:
The first issue, dated February 17, 1933, was a workmanlike job of news digesting by a staff of 22, and for four years it faithfully followed this pattern [until a new publisher took the helm in 1937 and it really kicked into high gear].
This is the second and final installment of the Harold Ross profile posted above.
When Mad Magazine first appeared on newsstands in 1952 it was immediately recognized as something quite new in so far as American satirical magazine humor was concerned. The earliest issues were produced in comic book format with almost all content produced by its founding editor, Harvey Kurtzman (1924 – 1993); by 1955 the magazine’s lay-out was altered to its current form. From its earliest days, Kurtzman and his publisher, William Gaines (1922 – 1992), began receiving unsolicited gags from many of the finest writers and performers on radio and TV. This article lists some of the scandals (both foreign and domestic) that the magazine inadvertently generated.
The Hobo News printed poems, cartoons, pin-ups, essays and news items that were useful to that unique class of men who rode the rails and frequent flop-houses. It was established in New York City by Pat The Roaming Dreamer Mulkern (1903 – 1948); the paper was run by hobos, for hobos and printed proudly across the awnings of their assorted offices were the words a little cheer to match the sorrow. Mulkern recognized that no self-respecting litigator would ever stoop to sue a newspaper with such a pathetic name, and so the paper was voluntarily in constant violation of U.S. copyright law by habitually printing the articles they most admired that had earlier appeared in Collier’s, The New Yorker and The Saturday Evening Post.
This article was written to mark the 100th anniversary of Punch and in so doing gives a very pithy history of the magazine and its editorial mission:
Yet, as a true chronicler of the times, Punch‘s volumes read more like a century-long history of England, and the magazine is never more on its mettle than during periods of crisis.
Unlike other publications that enter this world with high ideals and lofty ambitions in matters concerning free-speech, the right-to-know, good form and all that sort of stuff – only to slowly devolve into petty, libelous innuendo rags before they cease publication altogether – the British daily The News of The World (1843 – 2011) made its appearance on Fleet Street seeming as if it was already on its way out. As the saying goes, it sold out early and beat the rush.
Although its earliest editions covered the Crimean War, as well as all the other Victorian military adventures, the paper’s editorial policy had always been positioned somewhere to the left of Whoopee.
’47 Magazine was established in March of 1947 and it was their intention to change their name with the calendar year, year by year and on through the succeeding decades. We have in our vast periodical library a few copies of ’48 Magazine – but that is as far as they got before they were voted off the island.
It was a terrific magazine – and many of the names on their board of directors are recognized as some of the best literary minds that America had produced in the mid-Twentieth Century. But, as you’ll see when you read the attached manifesto (they called it a Statement of Intent, but I think that they really wanted to call it was a manifesto) they deeply desired to create an arts magazine that was entirely free of accountants, advertisers, lawyers, agents and, ultimately, profits; so they weren’t around very long.
